By: Martin Makaryan
Edited By: Edu Kenedi
This piece is commentary on a historical event and reflects the opinion of the author. The reflections in this article are partially based on the assigned readings for the “American Foreign Policy Since 1945” course taught at SAIS. The piece was adapted from an argumentative essay written for the class.
When Russia sent its ultimatum to the United States, as its 200,000 troops stood on the border in December 2021 with Ukraine ready to begin the large-scale invasion of the country, the main demand from the Kremlin was a written agreement that Ukraine would not become a NATO member and NATO forces would be withdrawn from Eastern Europe. This would essentially destroy a post-Cold War security architecture in Europe that has largely relied on NATO’s continuous enlargement to encompass most of the continent.
Before sending these demands to the White House, neither Putin nor anyone else in Moscow thought that the U.S. government would seriously contemplate such a move. In the same way that the Austro-Hungarian government sent an ultimatum to Serbia before WWI broke out, knowing very well it would be rejected and thus mobilizing for war simultaneously, Russia took the same route in a cheap attempt to use it as proof of the Russian sincerity for peace and to shift blame for a war of the Kremlin’s choice.
Strategic and military considerations aside, the deeper question, however, to why NATO is still such a contentious issue in the relationship between the world’s two largest nuclear powers, and is as relevant today as it was at the peak of the Cold War, warrants an answer different than most people will think.
To understand why, we must take a deeper dive into history.
The Post-WWII Geopolitical Necessities
The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany did not last long. Distrust and disagreements were present as the war against Hitler’s Germany went on. They became more pronounced as the Allies reached their much-desired victory. Soon after the common enemy was defeated, the Cold War set out to define the nature of the international system for the four decades that followed the most destructive global war in human memory.
The United States emerged from World War II as the least-harmed economic and military superpower. As President Harry Truman took office in April 1945, his Administration was faced with the question of navigating the uncertainty of the post-WWII environment and creating order out of essentially nothing.
The security dilemmas and the practical, strategic considerations that paved the way for the rise of the first real American grand strategy is often forgotten in this story. Europe’s recovery, the practical necessities of the defense of Western Europe, the evolution of the Soviet-American distrust, the German question, the threat of Communism, and all the other hard-hitting questions facing Truman in the crucial period between 1945 and 1953 are overshadowed by the more simplistic and comforting narrative. According to this narrative, the subsequent U.S. policy decisions were driven by a desire to expand power, influence, and an imperialist instinct to dominate the world. No other institution has been cited as the most obvious evidence of this narrative than NATO itself.
A Strategic Step of Incredible Magnitude
When the United States signed the Washington Treaty in April 1949, the reality of the international arena had changed significantly since May 1945. U.S. leaders may have thought that the North Atlantic Treaty was just a necessary collective security mechanism to deter the Soviet Union, but this step revolutionized American foreign policy.
It is commonly accepted to view America’s institutionalization of a security commitment to Europe as a “lesson learned” from the U.S. policy after WWI. The very outbreak of WWII is often cited as one outcome of the American disengagement from the world and unwillingness to exercise its power abroad. From this perspective, NATO’s creation was a logical, if not imminent, step towards fulfilling a worldwide “Manifest Destiny” by the United States.
Yet, taking NATO’s creation for granted not only obscures the dilemmas faced by the United States in the immediate aftermath of WWII regarding European security and its role in the world, it also discounts the crucial shift in strategic thinking in Washington in the crucial years between 1945 and 1949.
When WWII ended, few, if any, policymakers in Washington thought that American troops would stay in Europe indefinitely. The U.S. imperative, as officials in Washington saw it, was to help Western European allies recover economically and militarily and allow a “third force,” as President Eisenhower imagined it, to emerge through the European integration process.
But these strategic calculations soon changed—and they changed quickly. The early American thinking in regards to the post-WWII order was largely based on the self-assurance of security and deterrence based on America’s monopoly of the atomic bomb. The Soviet Union successfully acquired a nuclear bomb in 1949, which changed the entire security landscape of Europe and prompted the United States to rethink the practical implications of how Western Europe would be defended in case of a full assault from the Soviet Union, however unlikely that may have been at that time.
Even before the nuclear monopoly was abolished, the internal deliberations of the Truman administration on how to deal with the Soviet Union show that there was not a pre-set agenda or strategy in place that would instinctively lead to the creation of NATO. Truman had embraced containment of Communism and Soviet influence theoretically, as initially articulated by George Kennan’s famous telegram, but what this implied in terms of actual strategy was unclear. For example, in 1945, Truman still hoped that an agreement with the Soviets on settling the German question was possible.
Why NATO’s Creation Was a Revolution
So how does all of this historical background fit into the question of NATO’s creation as a revolution in American foreign policy?
The answer is simple: precisely because the United States was initially predisposed to revert back to its “default” foreign policy course. While Roosevelt had taken steps towards building a more secure world order built on great power cooperation, and Truman had initially attempted to continue this line, only a sober analysis of the limitations of what could have been achieved collaboratively with the Soviets paved the way for an optimal and coherent strategy to emerge.
Historian Melvyn Leffler refers to this period to describe the emergence of an American grand strategy, implying that there was none before that period. In a way, the shift in strategic thinking reflects a “coming of age” of American foreign policy. And crucial to this coming to terms with the reality of the world was NATO’s founding which became a cornerstone of the first true American grand strategy.
The creation of NATO charted a new course for the West — collective security. NATO also became the avenue to address “the elephant” in the room by integrating West Germany into this new security architecture, thus alleviating French security concerns and anchoring Germany in the Western alliance. Essentially, this pivotal step institutionalized American engagement in the world, dealt with the more immediate German question after 1945, and permanently bound North America and Europe in facing the challenges of the post-WWII world. More importantly, military cooperation became a strategic necessity after the Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons, changing the warfare calculus overnight. For the first time, the United States did not resort to its instinctive policy of de-militarizing completely after a global war.
By leading the creation of NATO, the United States took an unprecedented step in accepting the “novel burden from our shores,” as former Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously termed in 1947, and taking the responsibility bestowed upon America by the virtue of its sheer military and economic power at the end of WWII. By forging an alliance of free-market, liberal democracies, based on principles of collective security and mutual defense, and creating a permanent NATO bureaucracy and integrated command structure for transatlantic defense cooperation, the United States institutionalized its security commitment to Western Europe, built an order capable of withstanding the challenges of the Cold War, and crafted a new, resilient instrument to contribute to the success of American containment.
What had started as an international organization to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” as NATO’s first Secretary General famously said, was in fact a revolution in foreign policy thinking that would become critical to the post-Cold War security architecture in Europe. The implications of this critical decision cannot be understated as its consequences shape the events defining the nature of international relations today, from Russia’s war in Ukraine to the role that the United States will play in a newly unstable and unpredictable world.